sons.

and leading a singular and superior order of life apart from perWe see that human society in all times and places is the combined activities of persons who react upon each other in countless ways. It becomes a first consideration, then, to derive a thoroughly objective, positive, literal conception of these personal units, always producing social situations and social reactions.

Social philosophy, as just now hinted, has always vibrated between theories of individuals, regarded as independent, selfsufficient existences, and theories of society, regarded as an entity which has its existence either altogether independent of individuals or at least by and through the merging and the submerging of individuals. Accordingly the question has been debated from time immemorial: "Does society exist for the individual or the individual for society?" or, more specifically, "Does the state exist for the individual or the individual for the state?" In contrast with all the forms of philosophy which propose problems of this sort, it is a primary proposition of sociology that the issue raised by these inquiries is essentially artificial and fictitious, because the dilemma presented is created only by a begging of the real question. It is assumed that there is a disjunctive, alternative, exclusive relation between individuals and societies. At best the one is assumed to be merely a means to the other, in such a sense that the means ceases to be of account when it has done what it can toward the end. It is impossible to criticise in full this way of looking at things, without using concepts which need previous explanation — concepts which we shall reach presently. It is also impossible to say whether the psychologists or the sociologists have had most to do with discovering this fallacy. However this may be, the formulation of life in terms of activity has brought psychologists and sociologists to the point of view that individuals and societies are not means to each other, but phases of each other. A society is a combining of the activities of persons. A person is a center of conscious impulses which realize themselves in full only in realizing a society.

Quite recently there has been revived discussion of Aristotle's

dictum, "man is a social animal." It has been asserted and denied that Aristotle was right. Whether Aristotle meant to express what we now see to be the truth or not may be left to those who care for such trifles. That there is a sense, and an important one, in which man is a social animal is a primary sociological datum. Man cannot be man without acting and reacting with man. The presence of others is necessary in order that I may be myself. The self that is in me cannot become aware of itself, and display itself, except by means of contacts with other people. Just as the mind needs the body in order to be a force in the world; just as the hand needs the eye, and both need the nerves, and all need the heart, in order that either may be its peculiar self by doing a peculiar work in partnership with other organs; so a person is not a person without the reaction and the reinforcement which partnerships with other persons permit. It may be that men begin to occupy their place, a little above the anthropoid ape and a little lower than the angels, by perpetually fighting with each other. Whether this is the case or not, we know that the fighting which men have done with each other has been among the means of developing the individual and the social type. Using the term "social," not as an expression of moral quality, but as an index of reactions between conscious beings, it is as literally true, and first of all in the same sense true, that man is a social animal, as that the eagle is a bird of flight. The latter proposition does not mean that the eagle is born flying. It simply means that the eagle does not get to be an eagle except through learning to fly, and in the practice of flying. So men are social animals in the sense that they do not get to be men except through learning and practicing the arts of contact with other men.

All this is so simple, to be sure, that it might well go without saying, if different kinds of philosophy had not made the seemingly obvious fact a matter of doubt, dispute, and confusion. The sociologist needs to make the fact clear to himself at the outset of his attempts to understand society. The personal units that are the integers in all social combinations are not of themselves, apart from such combinations, integers at all. A

brick is as much a brick when it is dropped and forgotten on the way from the kiln to the building as the other bricks that are set in the wall. It is not a part of a structure, but it has all its individual characteristics independent of other bricks. A brick, qua brick, is not a social phenomenon. A person, on the contrary, cannot come into physical existence except through the co-operation of parent persons; he cannot become a self-sustaining animal unless protected for several years by other persons; and he cannot find out and exercise his capabilities unless stimulated to countless forms of action by contact with other persons. The personal units in society, then, are units that in countless ways depend upon each other for possession of their own personality. They find themselves in each other. They continually seek each. other. They perpetually realize themselves by means of each other.

We might go on to show that mere consciousness itself is, to a considerable degree, an affair not of an assumed individual, existing like a brick, unrelated to other bricks, and not dependent upon other bricks for its characteristics. Consciousness in itself, or at least self-consciousness, is not an individual but a social phenomenon. We do not arrive at self-consciousness except by coming into circuit with other persons, with whom we achieve awareness of ourselves. For sociological purposes this degree of refinement is unnecessary. We need to know simply that persons do not enlarge and equip and enrich and exercise their personality except by maintaining relations with other persons. Even Robinson Crusoe kept up a one-sided connection with society. If, when he walked out of the surf to the shore, he had left behind him the mental habits, the language, the ideas which he had amassed in contact with other persons, not enough available means of correlating his actions would have remained to provide him with his first meal.

It must be observed, further, that these considerations are not mere pedantic generalities. Some of the most intensely practical public questions of the present and the immediate future go back to premises involved in the foregoing. Some of the 1 Vid. BALDWIN, Social and Ethical Interpretations.

sharpest conflicts of opinion and practice in politics and business will have to be fought out on lines drawn from the base just indicated. For instance, old-fashioned Jeffersonian democracy was a political philosophy which assumed precisely the individualism rejected above as an optical illusion. All the modern variations of Jeffersonian democracy, in spite of their stalwart and salutary traits, are weak from the implications of this impossible individual, and they are foreordained failures in just the proportion in which they ignore the composite, dependent, social character of the individual. On the other hand, all the socialisms, from the mildest to the most radical, imply the opposite misconception, viz., that society is the only real existence, and that the personal units have no separate and distinct claims or character sufficient to modify theories devoted solely to the perfection of social organization. All socialisms tend to gravitate toward programs which magnify social machinery, and minimize the importance of the personal units. All such questions as that of municipal control of public utilities; the relation of the state to education, morals, the dependent classes, religion; the relation of the public to corporations and combinations, to artificial encouragement of industries by tariffs, patents, treaties, and other devices; with the thousand and one variations of the problems continually confronting every modern community; imply and involve assumptions about the relation of society as a whole to the personal units. Of course, very few persons will bring these fundamental considerations, in their naked academic form, into the arena of practical politics or business; but every person who influences politics or business will, consciously or unconsciously, throw into the scale the weight of his prejudice about this matter of the personal unit vs. the social whole. The sort of work that the sociologist has to do is needed as a means of reducing the weight of both kinds of prejudice, and of substituting for each a just conception of the intrinsic relation between the personal units and the social whole.

Accordingly, while we must emphasize this, so to speak, diffused social personality of the apparently individual units, and while the fact that each person realizes himself very largely at a

distance from himself in the activities of other persons-while this fact becomes a very significant factor in the most practical calculations of politics and business, the present tendencies in social theory and practice so strongly favor this side of the facts that emphasis of the personal side, the individual aspect, of the situation is imperative.

As a mere latest and highest order of the animal kingdom, the human race is simply a mass of matter formed by the operation of physical forces, and distributed through space by the operation of other physical forces. So far, the human race is one aggregate, as truly as the land and the water of the earth's surface, or the atmosphere that surrounds the earth, or the system of the starry host that fills the heavens. As a conscious company, however, the human race is not one aggregate, but a whole composed of as many distinct and selfimpelled units as there are persons in the human family. We have taken due account of the fact that society is always and inevitably conditioned by its character as a portion of flotsam and jetsam within a physical environment, and furthermore as a portion of that environment. But society, in that portion of its character which sociology has especially to consider, is not matter, but persons. These persons have such fundamental likenesses that certain general propositions are true of them all, and we both may and must think of them as one and inseparable. They have such decisive differences that we have to count with them as though they were radically and finally separate.

a

To express the facts in an illustration, society is not machine, a locomotive, for instance. Society has no single motor contrivance which furnishes power to all other parts of the machine. Society has no fire-box and boiler which send steam into the cylinders, and society does not transfer force from certain active parts to certain inert parts, so that the latter have power of motion. The trucks of the locomotive could not move of themselves. The driving-wheels could not move of themselves. The connecting-rod could not move of itself. The piston could not move of itself. The water could not boil of itself. Society, on the contrary, is a whole made up of